Dave was waking up. He unzipped his sleeping bag and stretched so hard his joints cracked. Then he was aware of the commotion and he looked dazedly around, his need for sleep still not fully supplied. Olivia, too, had begun to stir. “What’s up?” Dave asked Ethan, who shook his head.
The soldier listened to his friend, and then he said to Ethan, “I’m off guard duty now. Something’s going on outside.”
“What is it?” Dave asked, reaching for his cap. His hair was a mass of cowlicks.
“Don’t know yet. You folks just stay here.” With that, the soldier was striding away.
“Hell if I’ll stay here.” Dave put his cap and his workboots on and stood up. Other people were moving toward the entrance, drawn by the unknown. Olivia was getting out of her sleeping bag and JayDee said in a voice still husky with sleep, “What’s wrong? What’s happening?”
“I’m going to find out.”
Ethan saw Kushman, Jack the Gorgon, and the short bald dude joining the throng of people who moved past. Kushman gave him a quick glance, as if to note his position, and then walked on. Ethan sat watching the procession of humanity. He saw mothers holding children, teenagers so burdened they had aged prematurely far beyond their years, men who had likely lost their entire families, women bedraggled and thin with hunger and sorrow, elderly people struggling onward. An old woman on a walker was being helped by a man about her age, and a young boy about sixteen or so was helping both of them. Here was a middle-aged man on crutches, missing his left leg from the knee down. There a man with long gray hair and beard and the look of a suffering saint. A wizened woman who was likely only in her early thirties held the hand of a little girl and clutched a baby to her chest. A black man with a bandage covering half his face staggered past, his hand gripped in the hand of a skinny white man who urged him along in a quiet, patient voice.
The survivors, Ethan thought. And what made them want to live a day or an hour or a minute longer? Why had they not left this earth already by their own hands, as so many had at Panther Ridge? What did they believe in that made them struggle on, as painfully as that might be? Many had given up, faced with what they believed to be hopeless odds, but many had stayed too, holding onto some measure of hope, however fantastic it might be.
He respected these people. These humans, struggling on in the darkest of hours. They wanted to live, and they were fighting for whatever scrap of life they could claw from this battle of ancient foes. They deserved the chance to live without the shadows of Cyphers and Gorgons oppressing them, he thought. They had been through much and suffered much, just as humanity all across this world had suffered, and now they deserved freedom.
He stood up.
“Going with you,” said JayDee as he steadied himself with his rebar cane, and both Ethan and Dave helped him to his feet. Olivia still looked dazed from an uneasy sleep, dark circles under her eyes, and Ethan went to her side to make sure she didn’t fall because she looked so frail and unsteady, but she said, “I’m all right. Just hold my hand, okay?”
“I will,” he promised.
They made their way through the growing crowd to the mall’s entrance, where soldiers were trying to maintain some kind of order and failing miserably. Ethan saw people looking and pointing through the glass at something that seemed to be up in the dark, rainswept sky. He let go of Olivia’s hand and pushed his way toward the front, avoiding Kushman and the other two who stood nearby also peering through the glass. Captain Walsh was there, communicating with another soldier on her walkie-talkie, and Ethan was about to ask what was going on when he saw it himself.
A sphere of glowing red flames about five feet in diameter was hanging over the parking lot. As Ethan watched, what appeared to be red lightning bolts crackled out from it in all directions a distance of ten or twelve feet. Though the rain was still pouring down, the sphere was unaffected.
“You have any idea what that is?” the captain asked Ethan, pausing in her use of the walkie-talkie.
“I know it’s from the Cyphers.”
“How?”
“Red and blue. The Cyphers’ weapons put out red flames, the Gorgons’ blue. It’s different forms of energy.”
“Thing’s been sitting right there for the last fifteen minutes.” She levelled her gaze at him. “Any more ideas? The major’s out there with a recon team. He’d be real interested.”
He did have an idea, but how it came to him was another mystery. He just knew. “Recon,” he said, as he watched the sphere, “is right. That’s what it’s here for. It’s found something and it’s reporting back to wherever their command center is.”
“Found what? Us?” She didn’t hesitate, but shouted at another couple of soldiers, “Move these people back! Get them away from this glass!”
“You heard the captain! Come on, everybody move back! Let’s go!”
“Not us,” said Ethan, who was aware that Dave was coming up beside him.
“What?”
“They doesn’t care about us. They’ve found a—” Gorgon, he almost said. But he knew it was the truth. The Cyphers had sent out their own form of reconnaisance, searching the ruins of Denver for the enemy, and in this mall they had found one in human disguise who called himself Jack.
“Found what?” the captain asked. Suddenly dark shapes appeared out of the rain and Major Fleming came through the doors with four other soldiers, all of them wearing hooded ponchos and all dripping wet.
“Get these civilians back from here!” Fleming, his face strained and pallid, had nearly shouted it at Captain Walsh. “Away from this glass, now!”
“Back! Move back everybody!” another of the soldiers was yelling. He was using his rifle, held sideways, as a tool to push several people away from the doors but the crush was too thick.
Dave took hold of Ethan’s elbow. “Come on,” he said, “let’s move—”
Ethan saw something coming through the rain. His guts knotted up, because though it was moving very fast he thought he recognized what it was.
“It’s here,” he heard himself say, and Major Fleming spun around to look toward the parking lot, his eyes narrowed against the sphere’s glare.
A thin black missile about twenty feet long plowed into the parking lot just to the left of the sphere. Chunks of concrete flew up into the air. A second missile came in and hit about ten feet to the left of that one, digging itself a small ragged-edged crater. A third and fourth missile sped in, hitting the parking lot so close to the doors that pieces of concrete cracked the glass and caused the crowd to fall back trailing shouts and screams.
“Shit!” the major cried out. “What the—”
He never got to finish that sentence, because in the next instant four thin-legged, glistening black spider-shapes, each as big as a pickup truck, scrabbled out of the rain pursued by machine-gun bullets from the watchtowers. They crashed through the doors and sent them flying, even as the crowd retreated and then turned to run. Dave pulled Ethan with him, almost picking the boy up under his arm. The major and the captain had their pistols out and the soldiers were backpedalling but firing their rifles as fast as they could. The Cypher spiders were unharmed by bullets. The claws at the ends of their legs left grooves in the tiles, and the multiple rows of sharp teeth in the crimson slashes of their mouths were searching for meat, if not Gorgon then human, for all now were at the mercy of the Cyphers.
Which, Ethan realized as Dave pulled him away, was no mercy at all.
“Let me go!” he said, and just that quickly he wrenched loose from Dave, found his footing, and stood before the spiders as they scuttled forward.
“Come on! Don’t be a fool!” Dave shouted, still pulling at him, but Ethan would not be moved. The soldiers were still firing, using up clip after clip, and Ethan noted that before the slugs could hit little sparks of red jumped out of the creatures and seemed to either incinerate or evaporate the bullets. The Cypher spiders carried their own force fields with them.